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Sunday, June 10, 2012

ICQG and BGA 2012

In a week I'll be attending ICQG 2012 (International Conference on Quantitative Genetics) and BGA 2012 (annual meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association), both in Edinburgh. If you want to meet up, let me know!

The title of my talk is Some results on the genetic architecture of human intelligence. I will post my slides on the blog at some point. For now, here are a few (click for larger versions).

As a physicist and quantum mechanic it is natural for me to think about a genome as a vector in a very high dimensional space. Geometrical notions follow ...

4 comments:

Richard Seiter
said...

I'm looking forward to seeing the slides. Re: "a genome as a vector in a very high dimensional space", what do you think about combining the genome with phenotypic characteristics (both relatively stable, like height and weight, and more variable, like blood test measurements) and using the combination as your vector?

Could you suggest a book that discusses multidimensional space from a conceptual viewpoint, appropriate for someone who did undergrad level quantum chemistry/physics and linear algebra and then stopped?

I don't think it's hard. Steve expects to find something like a star or a constellation of stars in his space of SNPs. At the center of the star will be the smartest of the smart, and as one goes out from the center the star rarefies and the density of smarts does too.

If only the SNPs frequencies varied independently the density distributon about the center would be normal.

But it's all irrelevant. The "heritability" is only meaningful in the context of breeding for a specific environment.